A License to Feel

You can visit any church in any city at any time, and if the church uses art, you’ll most likely see that art being used in one of two ways. The first way is obvious. The second way…not so much.

First, art can help communicate truth. For men and women who enjoy teaching, this comes naturally. They employ art as a communication tool. When a song fits the sermon lyrically, art is being used to communicate truth. When a video bumper is played just before a sermon, art is being used to communicate truth. Anytime someone tells a masterfully crafted story, art is being used in this way. By and large, I think the North American Church has become really good at using art to communicate truth. But there’s another beautiful use of art, and I wish churches would explore this in their unique settings.

Art can help ignite fresh and unresolved cravings. Art not only communicates truth, it creates emotional uprisings. Art opens.

“A work of art introduces us to emotions which we have never cherished before. Great works produce, rather than satisfy needs, by giving the world fresh cravings.” — Abraham Heschel

Emotions we’ve never cherished before. Fresh cravings.

Many churches have never considered giving an entire congregation the chance to experience fresh cravings. Many church leaders won’t admit they crave anything. People come to church to get quenched, not to highlight any further need for quenching. Besides that, it’s far safer to give people tips and techniques and formulas rather than give them a license to feel.

Yet for those who might consider allowing art to stir intense emotional uprisings, they will discover the solemn beauty of art as an instigating tool in the hands of the Potter. It gives people the chance to sit, contemplate, and experience a wider variety of emotions.

“We sit down before a picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender.”
— C.S. Lewis

Sometimes I wonder if, rather than causing us to leave with a smile, God’s will for us is to sit in our own personal pond of holy agitation the whole morning and actually experience the ache of seeing no way out. And what if He wants to use a painting, a sculpture, a dance, a drama, or a video to push us headlong into that pool? The Psalmist declares that the Shepherd “… makes me lie down.” (Psalm 23) Sometimes, God has to force us to lie down, which gives us eyes to see the green pasture that surrounds us. I wonder if art in the church could become a tool of the Shepherd’s forcing.

At my church, we have a Good Friday service. It’s not a service like you’re envisioning though. Participants are invited to walk into a room filled with art—video, music, paintings, and symbols. We’re given an unlit candle. We’re also given a printed handout, designed to loosely guide us through the Stations of the Cross. It doesn’t matter how fast or slow we progress. We can stop, pray, experience, weep. No one is leading, no one is on the stage, and no one is speaking. Finally, most of us light the candle and place it at the cross in the center of the dimly lit room.

At the end of the experience, we ache. The closest thing we feel to joy is probably thankfulness, but even that pales in comparison to the unresolved anguish in our collective gut.

Art used in this manner reminds participants that not everything needs to be resolved for it to be beautiful. Do we actually force resolutions and outcomes on our people because closure makes us feel better? The tragedy with always providing closure is that real life rarely follows suit.

Imagine paintings displayed at the right location. Sculptures that people are forced to walk past, even to touch. A beautifully designed table used during the Eucharist. Images on the screen underscored by silence. Stories told beautifully. Smells of smoke or roses or bread. Music that soars, then dies, then rises again. Lighting that helps people focus on the beauty found in the moment.

So what if art can provide an opening, not only a closing? What if, every week, your church had the ability to drop a beautiful piece of art into the worship experience and just let it sit there? Using art this way isn’t the opposite of using art to communicate truth; it’s actually the beautiful sister many of us have never met.

And while there are a myriad of qualifying questions to ask in the planning of your worship services, they could easily be reduced to just two: What are we hoping to communicate? What fresh cravings are we hoping to ignite?

Art has already been created by God to answer both of those questions. You work hard during the week at setting the table, and then allow the masses to feast. Because, no matter the size of your church, your worship experience can be so much more than some music and a lecture.